MacGruber

Jorma Taccone’s MacGruber (2010) is a comedy (more like a parody of an action movie) about a legendary hero of the US military who moves to Latin America to take a break from his work, after his wife is assassinated by his worst enemy. MacGruber (Will Forte) fakes his own death and hides in Rio Bamba, Ecuador (a fictional city named after Ecuador's real Riobamba). The MIA (a security agency based on the CIA) tracks him down and convinces him to participate in an operation led by his wife’s murderer. He travels to Washington DC and forms a team with agent Piper and an old friend called Vicki.

The plot is built around the character of MacGruber. Considered a legend because of past successes helping the US government in uncountable special operations, MacGruber is depicted as the only hope to stop Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). However, the ten years he has spent hidden in Ecuador seems to have taken his abilities away. He has become the opposite of a hero: a man whose egocentrism and evident mental issues are reflected in constant failure. Thus, as the plot develops, we realize that the legend of MacGruber is more and more fictitious. He still does his job, albeit rather takes the credit for other’s job, from beginning to end.

Basically, only the second scene of the movie portrays something about Latin America (which adds up to about five minutes of the whole production). In Rio Bamba, we see MacGruber meditating in a small monastery with religious portraits over the walls. The village had been MacGruber’s peaceful refuge for ten years. While the MIA general is trying to convince the hero to join the operation, people from what seems to be an indigenous peasant village walk in the background. However, the clothes the people wear, and the landscapes shown, do not belong to an accurate representation of an Ecuadorean village (still less of the real Riobamba, which is not a village but one of Ecuador's largest cities). The place looks more like something inspired on a Mexican village. But these details do not change what is depicted of Latin America, from its name we know that it is a fictional representation of some poor and hidden village that no one cares about.

Arranging the set in which the scene of Rio Bamba is recorded with Mexican molds gives us an understanding that, on the one hand, the imagination of Americans about Latin America is that everything south of the border looks the same. Or on the other hand, that Americans do not know much about Latin American society or its people (or that learning about them is irrelevant), and that their depictions of Latin America are mostly based on general imaginations of it (often stereotyped assumptions).

What is being depicted in the movie about Ecuador does not tell us anything about the country or Latin America, it is not realistic, but it is not important neither. Indeed, the entire movie was filmed in New Mexico, US. The only reason that this scene is included for MacGruber’s plot is to emphasize that a hero decided to go to a place where he was going to be difficult to find. Why would someone go to that village with houses made of dry mud, dirt streets and no electricity? An American hero was there and that made that place interesting enough to travel to.

Strange Wilderness

Strange Wilderness (2008) is a comedy directed by Fred Wolf about an animal TV show. A son takes over his dead father’s TV show which has become a failure at risk of cancellation as it lacks inspiration, budget and audience. The program is widely criticized because of the inaccuracy between its themes and what is presented on the screen; the show has passed from being an educational natural wilderness-themed program to a sensationalist and ridiculous representation of human wilderness (sex, blood, and drugs). To honour his father’s memory, the son, Peter (Steve Zahn), forms a group of four men and a woman to look for the legendary “Bigfoot” creature in the Ecuadorian forest. A trip to Latin America could help the group increase the show’s ratings, and it is also an opportunity to go on a real and wild adventure. It is a parody of animal-life shows like National Geographic or Animal Planet and questions the concept of “wilderness.”

By the time they get to the jungle, we know that any representation of animal wilderness will have a sexual undertone, a tragic death, or some footage of animal life accompanied by a nonsensical description. When they arrive at the Ecuadorean jungle, for example, the first wild animal to be portrayed in the TV show is a monkey, shown with the comment that “monkeys make up over 80% of the monkey population.” Immediately thereafter, Peter randomly talks about lions, zebras, giraffes, and gazelles, all iconic animals from Africa, not South America. The movie is full of generally mistaken and mismatching information like this one that let us assume that the group has no idea of what they are doing or talking about, which contributes to the simplistic humour of the plot.

Clearly each member of the group has a problem with drugs, alcohol, or/and a perverted mind which relates everything to sex. Men are presented like some kind of prehistoric troglodytes trying to show off their masculinity to the rest of the group Their uncontrollable and desperate need for women, and their failing efforts to prove themselves superior to animals, make their silliness extremely obvious. The only woman in the group (also basically the only woman in the movie) adds the brain to the group. She seems very aware of the ridiculousness of the trip and of the teenage-perversion of the group, but she is doing her job, so her opinion does not really count.

The trip to Ecuador is not only an adventure to find Bigfoot; it also represents hope to find their better selves. For Pete, keeping the show on screen is saving a legacy and part of his pursuit to become more like his dad. For Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan), going to a recondite place in the middle of the jungle is a chance to force himself out of alcoholism and to experience real life (sober). For the group as a whole, this journey forms not only a group of colleagues but a group of new friends.

In the movie, travelling to the South American wilderness (and finding Bigfoot) is the craziest idea one could have. And to everyone's surprise, since the plot is full of failures, in the end they do indeed find the creature. However, their hopes vanish after they “accidentally” kill Bigfoot and go back to the United States.

How is Latin America being portrayed? One of the reasons the group travels South the Border is to fulfill their expectations of presenting “real wilderness” in the TV show so it stays on the screen. Through the journey across the jungle to find Bigfoot, we are introduced to a dangerous place (funny, exotic, but dangerous): a lot of monkeys, snakes, carnivorous piranhas, tribes that cut scrotums and kill with arrows, explorers who will take advantage of you and steal your belongings, and of course the enormous Bigfoot.

Yet the portrayal of Latin American nature is not really important to the plot (we know that all the information given is intentionally mistaken or exaggerated because of the genre). The main reason for going on the trip is to seek out new material that will increase the TV show’s ratings. Animal life, whether it is a Latin American beast or an insect from the tree outside a building, is taken and exploited as a commodity. In the movie, those kinds of TV shows will not portray wilderness as it is, but as the audience wants it. Nature has been fetishized with sensationalist images; sex, blood, or comedy itself are more important than the facts. This is very clear at the end of the movie after the Bigfoot report is not accepted since Pete decides to film an episode about shark attacks, which saves the TV show. "People love shark attacks, you are back again," says the TV director. And what is wilderness? Who or what is "the wild"? Even though the TV show is called Strange Wilderness (referring to wild animals) and the Latin America jungle is the wildest place they could go to, ridiculing aspects of American pop culture like views on the use of drugs and guns, the sexual portrayal of women on TV (even worse of women of tropical places like Latin America and Africa), and sensationalism to create profit, suggest that animal-life or Latin America is not the only wild ideas portrayed in this film (they are scarcely important at all in the movie, to be honest).

Certainly, what is being portrayed about the Latin American jungle might appear quite wild, but these imaginaries of wilderness (like violent indigenous tribes and creatures living in caves) are only the space to which Western Society compares itself to argue it is superior, and a more civilized society. Wilderness is a word used to emphasize the most uncivilized, least human, least Western aspects of life. It is a word used to create a division and to reject certain truths that make "civilized" society uncomfortable. What could be wilder than killing animals for no reason, seeing women as a sexual object, becoming desperate for food or sex, doing crazy things under the influence of alcohol and drugs, feeling entertained when there is a shark attack or someone dies, and then using all these things to have more ratings on screen?

Snatched

The New Yorker Jonathan Levine directs the comedy Snatched (2017). In this movie, Levine satirizes the typical motivations an American decides to travel to the Latin American “paradise”. Emily (Amy Schumer) convinces her boring mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) to be her partner in a journey to Ecuador. Ecuador for Emily is not the typical resort vacations in some Mexican beach, but rather it is a real exotic adventure that can make her forget about her pathetic life (and it is also a non-refundable ticket that must be used). Ironically, they stay in a fancy resort at the beach, but Emily wants to experience the real Ecuador with a handsome guy she just meets at the pub.

Without listening to the advice of two retiree US intelligence agents, Emily goes to a party in the middle of a jungle landscape with a stranger in which Emily parties as Latinos do, learning capoeira? The day after she brings her mother to an adventure with the same guy who is supposed to take them to see waterfalls, but he was taking them far enough so they can get kidnapped. On the next morning, they wake up in Colombia and try to escape. Trying to get help, they find another American called Roger Simmons in a small village who appears to be their hope for salvation. Roger wears an explorer outfit and is very confident taking the two women through the jungle, though he has been in Latin America only for three weeks.

This movie portrays the ingenuity and imprudence of Americans when they travel to Latin America. Tourist look for adventure in an exotic place. But they also put themselves in dangerous situations, consciously like the American that pretended to be an explorer and the retiree agents that are looking for some action, or unconsciously like Emily and her mother who were too foolish that it becomes part of a predictable and laughable comedy.

Another interesting portrayal of the previous one (not about Latin America alone, but about American in Latin America) concerns foreign intervention for security reasons. Emily’s brother Jeffry calls and goes repeated times to the policy after he is informed of the kidnapping. Though of all the resources the police department has for tracking people, they do nothing until it is almost too late. American intelligence agents appear at the end of like the saviours, but when all the work was already done. The US embassy in Bogota neither could help. Basically, the message is that once you cross the border, the United States will not protect any of its citizens (but it could).

If this plot was not a comedy, a kidnapping and no support from the US will be terrifying. However, Levine makes those events seem better than they look, and mother and daughter even go again on a trip after this awful experience. Latin America is in this movie a place for adventure (though it might be a dangerous one). Even after experiencing violence and almost being killed, the trip was probably better than whatever they could be doing back home, and even inspires them to travel again. The plot might not be clearly promoting or opposing Ecuador, Colombia or any other Latin American country as a travel destination, but it shows that it is the American tourist who put themselves in danger by idealizing Latin America as that exotic place full of adventure, but by overestimating their own capacities and of their country. Latin America becomes attractive because it makes visitors leave their comfort zone.

A Dark Truth

Damian Lee’s A Dark Truth (2012) is an action and thriller movie that narrates the story of an armed conflict between the people of an agrarian community in Ecuador, and an international corporation (helped by the local government) which has purchased all water rights of the area for their profit. Though conflicts over water have been reported in documentaries several times, the first movie about contested water rights in Latin America was Tambien la Lluvia (Even the Rain) in 2010. The drama was about the best-known reactionary conflict on the issue using information of real events experienced in Bolivia from an insider point of view (it portrayed the reality of those being affected by water privatization). However, Lee delivers this new production on the same topic but with a new perspective. Its plot focuses on the escalation of the armed battle and how it is handled internationally.

Clearbec, a Canadian corporation that has invested in water rights purchase in Latin America and South Africa to provide “quality water” back in North America, has been linked to a violent upheaval in one of its supplier countries. In a fictional village called Tayca in Ecuador (though the filming location is the Dominican Republic), an eco-activist has organized peasants to protest the privatization and exploitation of their water sources. In an attempt to stop the pacifist demonstrations, the military forces in Ecuador paid by Clearbec started a massacre targeting protestors and their leader, Francisco Francis (Forest Whitaker) who is now being accused of eco-terrorism. In Toronto, Jack (Andy García), a CIA retiree, is hired by one of the CEOs of the corporation to investigate what happened in Ecuador and bring back Francisco Francis, so all the world can know the truth, even if this could mean the decay of the water privatization business and the company’s reputation globally. Tensions become stronger and more violent between all the parties involved in both Ecuador and Canada when the dark truth is about to be revealed. Jack finds the ecology activist and takes him to Toronto so he can speak up about the ecological damages and the social injustices committed against Ecuadorian peasants to fulfill Clearbec’s economic interests.

Lee depicts corporate businesses that turn vital resources rights (such as water and air) into commodities with a price in the market as morally wrong. But in contrast to Bollaín's Even the Rain, this movie is not a political critique to private corporatism or neoliberalism. Any ideological position that the plot might suggest is ambiguous. For example, Jack opposes the privatization of water publicly, however, his opposition is only a personal point of view. It becomes a problem when he is informed that people are dying for it, the reason for escalating violence which he will not try to stop, but only help someone scape (an interesting narrative to build an action movie). That might be why deeper details about the problem are omitted.  In the same way, very little is said about Ecuador's government and politics other than corporate bribery that was used to induce the state's military involvement. Indeed, any other country in the world could be a perfect location for what this movie offers. 

Latin America is only a place, and the water privatization is only background information that gives the conflict, typical of a Hollywood action movie, a bit more of sense. And since portraying the place or the issue accurately is not of importance for this movie´s plot, simple aspects such as descriptions of Ecuadorean cities or its people are hugely mistaken such as knowing that its capital is not of tropical weather with jungle sounds in the background, or that “Esmeralda” province is actually called Esmeraldas. Even “typical” phrases Ecuadoreans might say and the way its people look are totally out of place. But those little things do not affect the overall story, the audience only needs to know that a bad company had corrupt businesses in some poor village in some part of a tropical place with a lot of natural resources to exploit, and this is morally wrong.